Got a couple new reviews for ya this week: the very cute Sketch and the much-too-much Oh, Hi! Plus the Village People, cat videos, Star Trek, Nazis, 47 different screenings of Despicable Me 4... you know, the usual stuff.
Special Screenings
Thursday, July 31
Nothing But a Winner (2025)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
A reverent doc about the rise of University of Alabama football. $16.33. 7 p.m. More info here.
Crimes of the Future (2022)
Emagine Willow Creek
They're saying surgery is the new sex. Full review here. $11.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Wild Robot (2024)
Emagine Willow Creek
AI propaganda. $3. 11 a.m. More info here.
M (1931)
The Heights
Peter Lorre at his most Peter Lorrean. $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Lady and the Tramp (2019)
Loring Park
This movie is about dogs so there can be nothing wrong with it. (Did I get that right?) Free. 8:40 p.m. More info here.
Bottle Rocket (1996)
Parkway Theater
Wes Anderson at his least Wes Andersonian. $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m.; movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)
Riverview Theater
This is where I say “not 4 me!” again. $1. 11 a.m. More info here.
Princess Mononoke (1997)
Riverview Theater
This Ghibli is not for the kids. $5. 9:15 p.m. Friday-Saturday 11 p.m. More info here.
Super Volcano (2025)
Trylon
These superhero movies are getting out of hand. $8. 10 a.m. More info here.
Friday, August 1
Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Alamo Drafthouse
The saga begins. Also Monday-Wednesday. $12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Despicable Me 4 (2024)
Emagine Willow Creek
Not 4… ah, fuck it. Through Wednesday. $3. 11 a.m. More info here.
Remember the Titans (2000)
Lake Harriet Bandshell
Cronos, Rhea, Hyperion—sure, I remember them all. Free. 8 p.m. More info here.
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
Loring Park
A "bike-in" movie, screened on a projector bike! Free. 8:45 p.m. More info here.
Holes (2003)
Minnesota Humanities Center Lawn
Sounds dirty. Free. 8:55 p.m. More info here.
Scream It Off Screen
Parkway Theater
Screaming feels so good! $13/$19. 8 p.m. More info here.
Nightshift (1981)
Trylon
A London hotel clerk observes the goings on at work one evening. $8. Friday-Saturday 7 & 8:30 p.m. Sunday 3 & 4:30 p.m. More info here.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Walker Art Center
The one with the whales. Also Saturday. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, August 2
CatVideoFest 2025
Alamo Drafthouse/Edina 4/Emagine Willow Creek/Main Cinema/Riverview Theater
Psst, the Riverview is the best deal. Alamo: Also Sunday. $10.99. 11:30 p.m. More info here. Edina: $11.61. 12 & 4 p.m. More info here. Emagine: $10.60. 1:30 & 3:50 p.m. More info here. Main: Also Sunday. $12. 12 & 4:30 p.m. More info here. Riverview: Also Sunday. $5. 9:30 a.m. & 11:15 .m. More info here.
The Tale of Zatoichi (1962)
Alamo Drafthouse
The adventures of the blind swordsman. Also Monday. $10.99. 2 p.m. More info here.
BTS Army: Forever We Are Young (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
Hell yeah I’m a member of the BTS army—the Built to Spill army. $21.60. 2 p.m. Sunday 12 p.m. More info here.
The Wild Robot (2024)
Folwell Park
It’s everywhere this summer. Free. 8:40 p.m. More info here.
The Lion King (1994)
Granada
Join the circle of life as you eat dinner. Presented by Taste the Movies. $169. 6 p.m. More info here.
The Toxic Avenger (1984)
Main Cinema
Crazy that they’re remaking this. Presented by Midnight Mayhem. $11. 10 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, August 3
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2000)
Alamo Drafthouse
Pretty sure this is the one with the sorcerer’s stone. $10.99. 2 p.m. More info here.
Sunset Boulevard (1955)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
How’s he narrating if he’s dead? Also Monday. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Emagine Willow Creek
You know, they really didn’t sing so good. Also Wednesday. $12.60. 4:15 & 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Interstellar (2014)
Grandview 1&2
For those of you who like math in your blockbusters. $14.44. 9 p.m. More info here.
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
Trylon
Richard Burton ain't no goddam son of a bitch. $8. 6:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 p.m. More info here.
Monday, August 4
AMC Screen Unseen
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
What could it be? $7. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)
Edina 4
The saga continues. $3.96. 10 a.m. Also Wednesday. More info here.
Interstellar (2014)
Edina 4
In case you’d rather see it in Edina. $12.15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Witchboard (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
An advance screening of the new remake. $12.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Can’t Stop the Music (1980)
The Heights
How did I not know that this Village People camp romp was directed by Nancy Walker? $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Elemental (2023)
Linden Hills Park
Look how early that start time is. Free. 8:40 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, August 5
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Alamo Drafthouse
The white Sinners. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
What If? (2010)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Christian kitsch starring Minnesota's own Kevin Sorbo. $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.
Critical Role: Oaths & Ash (2025)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Rosedale 16/Marcus West End
Got so mocked last time when I said I didn’t know what this was. Well, I looked it up. You happy now? $21.92. 7 p.m. More info here.
Despicable Me 4 (2024)
East Side Freedom Library
Sigh. Free. 8:45 p.m. More info here.
Inside Out 2 (2024)
Luxton Park
Your child’s imagination is filled with project managers. Free. 8:40 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, August 6
Weapons (2025)
Alamo Drafthouse
An advance screening of the new film from the director of Barbarian. $13.99. 7 p.m. More info here.
Clueless (1995)
Alamo Drafthouse
Thirty years ago. Damn. $20. 7 p.m. More info here.
Lucia di Lammermoor
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
An encore from The Met. $16.28. 1 & 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks
Trylon
It’s always sold out! $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Inside Out 2 (2024)
The Commons
Downtown is back! Free. 8:40 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Architecton
A documentary “about the ways that stone and concrete architecture express the values of societies” that will either be endlessly fascinating, unbelievably dull, or both.
The Bad Guys 2
Just when they thought they were out, they pull them back in!
Folktales
Teens learn how to survive the elements at a Norwegian Folk School in the Arctic Circle.
Kingdom
An Indian spy action film.
The Naked Gun
I spent most of middle school repeating Police Squad! lines with my friends, but I have my doubts about this reboot.
Sketch
My comically exaggerated exasperation aside, I don’t hate kids’ movies. I just think most of ’em are for, well, kids. But Seth Worley’s goofy but genuinely creepy Sketch was a pleasant surprise. Tony Hale is raising two children after his wife’s death: Amber (Bianca Belle), who’s channeling her anger into drawings of cartoonishly vicious monsters, and Jack (Kue Lawrence), the protective brother who just wants everything to be the way it was. When Amber’s drawings get dumped into a magical lake, her visions come to life, and many of these predators of crayon, marker, and chalk target a boy who teases her (the perfectly annoying Kalon Cox). There’s something a little too much of the pitchman about Worley—the screening I attended ended with an ad for an app that can bring your own kid’s drawings to life. But without edging into trauma dump territory, his script feels emotionally astute to me, and its characters more like actual kids than most onscreen young’uns. Parents really do need to take it easy when naming their babies though—this cast also includes a Jaxen, a Genesis, and a Leigha. B+
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Eddington
If you’ve ever wondered what Ari Aster would make of Covid, Black Lives Matter, and our all-too-online modern existence… why? Why would you ever wonder that? Aster’s films are airless, carefully arranged dioramas, which is OK when you work in horror, where self-contained formalism can be part of the point, but unacceptable when you’re using the murder of George Floyd and the aftermath in Minneapolis as a plot point for your dim satire. Joaquin Phoenix, in Doc Sportello stumblin’ ‘round mode, is an Arizona sheriff (styled to resemble Dennis Weaver, which is funny, I admit); he’s so miffed that he has to mask up that he decides to unseat the town’s smug mayor, Pedro Pascal. With seemingly every encounter between townsfolk mediated by screens, misinformation proliferates, bodies pile up, and everyone, from dumbass cops to woke protesters, embodies their worst selves. That, apparently, is How We Live Now. But what’s so soul-deadening about internet life isn’t just how it leads us to act out in cartoonish ways; it’s how it encourages us to perceive our fellow humans from a single, simple vantage point, to strip their actions of all context, and to make that point, Aster would have had to give us some three-dimensional characters to begin with. Plodding loudly toward its preordaining conclusion, Eddington is as cynical and misanthropic as dumb people have always said the Coen brothers are; worse still, its cynicism and misanthropy are flaunted as intellectual and spiritual achievements. And Aster really needs to get over his mommy issues. C
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
F1
Well of course this is Top Gun for race cars—you thought Joseph Kosinski was gonna go back to directing Tron movies and Halo ads? What matters is that F1’s on-track action is as gripping as Top Gun: Maverick’s mid-air feats, and there are moments that had me, a non-gasper, gasping. The acting bits are not entirely as bad as those TG:M’s Oscar-nominated screenplay made us endure. And if your attention may wander in these off-track moments, at least F1 (I am not calling it F1: The Movie—I got my own Google problems to worry about) leaves us at leisure to compare and contrast Tom Cruise’s smugness with Brad Pitt’s: eternal youth vs. staved-off decline, skill vs. savvy, unnerving intensity vs indolent swagger. Yes, ideally, Pitt’s Sonny Hayes would learn as much from his younger colleagues as he teaches them, but instead it’s the wily old driver who touches the lives of everyone he encounters—he’s kind of a Magical Caucasian. Chastened hotshot Damson Idris learns not to showboat for the press. Kerry Condon overcomes his mistrust of Sonny’s arrogance long enough to bed him. And team owner Javier Bardem, who took a chance on Sonny, sees his long shot pay off, defeating the machinations of evil-as-ever Tobias Menzies. And they say Hollywood doesn’t make movies for aging white guys who feel like their talents have gone unacknowledged anymore. B-
Oh, Hi!
There’s just too much going on in Sophie Brooks’s manic take on 21st century dating, co-written with Molly Gordon. Gordon is Iris, who takes it very hard when she discovers the fella who brought her on a romantic getaway (Logan Lerman) isn’t as committed as she is: She leaves that sucker strapped to a bed (they’d been toying with some bondage gear before their spat) to reconsider his decision. You gotta have real control over material like that to make it work, but this story swerves from broad comedy to dark drama and even dips its toe into a witchcraft subplot at one point. Gordon and (weaselly mustache aside) Lerman are such engaging leads that they carry it much of the way, but I gotta ask anyone who says the film is “playing with" or somehow complicating our preconceptions about the idea of the “crazy girlfriend”: Would you date this woman? As someone old enough to have some distance but single enough to be implicated in male shenanigans (and with soft-boy tendencies myself), I appreciate how much ground Oh, Hi! covers. Still, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think a guy should be imprisoned for giving head in the afternoon. B-
House on Eden—ends Thursday
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Jurassic World Rebirth
Well, at least now we know why the dinosaurs went extinct—they couldn’t hunt for shit. I mean, one predator here not only fails to gobble up a child hiding under a life raft, but the loser can’t even pop the raft. Godzilla director Gareth Edwards and original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp (who I’ll just note is also responsible for the Indiana Jones duds The Dial of Destiny and The Crystal Skill) were called upon to right this series seven installments in, but the best they can dream up is an island of mutant dinosaurs like the Distortus Rex and the Mutadon. Plotwise, a team of mercenaries organized by Scarlett Johansson (who must have serious gambling debts or something) is dispatched to collect blood samples from the three largest breeds of dinosaurs, a key ingredient in a cure for heart disease. En route, the adventurers rescue a family that’s crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat, because the pictures needs children to imperil. The pro-forma backstory these characters are given is worse than none at all—a friend of Johansson’s Zora Bennett was blown up by a Yemen car bomb so she’s ready to retire, Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kincaid lost his son so he wants to protect children (he’d let them die otherwise?). But it’s hard to care what happens to these people unless you’re just opposed in principle to the idea of make-believe humans being eaten by make-believe dinosaurs. C
The Life of Chuck
Tom Hiddleston is one of many talented actors who profitably allowed the MCU to Thanos-snap away the prime of his career, and from the looks of The Life of Chuck he doesn’t seem like he’ll be back to doing quietly intense Joanna Hogg films anytime soon. In this razzle-dazzle puzzle of a heart-tugger he’s Chuck Krantz, a mysterious accountant who turns out not to be so mysterious after all. Once the film pulls the metaphysical rug out from under a resonantly apocalyptic first act, The Life of Chuck stacks the deck in the interests of life-affirming profundity so gratuitously you can tell it’s lying to itself. There’s a good reason I don’t turn to Stephen King for the profound or Mike Flanagan for the life-affirming (or vice versa). Though seeing both Mia Sara and Heather Langenkamp as old ladies certainly does confront the middle-aged among us with intimations of mortality, the inexorable passage of time, and all that jazz. C+
Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning
How is it that the only prominent person in this dumb country suspicious of AI seems to be Tom Fuckin’ Cruise? The most consistent action franchise this side of John Wick wraps up (or does it?—you really think that peppy lil guy is about to retire?) with Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt fighting to prevent an all-powerful artificial intelligence called The Entity from starting a nuclear war. But The Final Reckoning is no more immune to bloat than any other blockbuster—you could lop a full half-hour of talking from this nearly three-hour adventure and no one would be the wiser. The script hunts for loose ends from previous installments just to tie them up, and the supporting cast is uneven—if Pom Klementieff has a truly fierce shooting-people face, Esai Morales remains a nonentity of a villain. By next month, you’ll remember The Final Reckoning as the MI where Tom hunts through a nuclear sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and climbs around on a biplane as the wind resistance does weirder things to his face than Vanilla Sky. Both incredible set pieces, worth the price of admission even. But you’ll probably forget most of the rest. I already have. B
Sorry, Baby
Eva Victor takes some getting used to. As a screen presence, they often hold back cryptically behind a half-smile or throw other actors off the beat with their own rhythms, capturing how awkwardness feels to be around, rather than how it's typically performed on screen. Yet to say Victor seems like a person who learned to talk from the internet is description, not criticism; we’ve had decades of actors who learned to talk from TV or magazines or other movies after all. Victor also wrote and directed Sorry, Baby, which takes some getting used to as well. Partly it’s the non-chronological storytelling, which feels unnecessary and therefore affected, but it’s also because Sorry, Baby is the story of a sexual assault, and how to talk about it, or around it, when the words you have to communicate seem to distort what you’ve experienced. What anchors the film is the friendship between Victor’s Agnes and Naomi Ackie’s Lydie, and how it shifts over time. Often the humor is too broad for the scenario (Agnes’s nemesis Natasha, played by Kelly McCormack, feels especially sitcommy), and Sorry, Baby can also feel too crafted, with Victor creating moments—a stranger commiserating with Agnes after a panic attack, a postcoital cuddle ruined by a discussion of the future, a heart-to-heart about life’s cruelties with your friend’s infant—that feel deliberate, arranged, artistic. But all these moments, along with the halting discussion between Agnes and Lydie immediately after the assault, all work, and isn’t great filmmaking about believing in the illusion even when you know how the trick is done? A-
Superman (read the full review here)
James Gunn’s flagship reboot of the DC film universe has its moments. In its best scene, a smug Clark Kent insists on a candid interview—as Superman—with co-worker/girlfriend Lois Lane, and the ace journalist he’s dating pulls no punches, getting in as many good hits as any of Lex Luthor’s henchfolk. David Corenswet’s Clark/Kal/Supes is all-too-human, with a real temper and self-regard bubbling up from beneath his Midwestern aw-shuckistude. He’s well-matched by Rachel Brosnahan, a purely 21st century Lois Lane who avoids Rosalind Russell throwback vibes as she fields modern problems like work-life balance and how to fly Mr. Terrific’s spacecraft. Yet the rest of Superman never matches the energy of that interview; in fact, Gunn foolishly splits Clark and Lois up on separate adventures. As we enter a world of intra-dimensional pocket universes and Metropolis-(Cleveland- actually) gobbling black holes, Superman gets loud and ugly and digital and, well, MCUish. And sorry, there’s just too much Krypto. B-
28 Years Later
Maybe I was just in a shitty mood (though I don’t remember being in one when I walked into the theater) but this Danny Boyle/Alex Garland reunion irritated the hell out of me. Could be Boyle’s affected jitter-glitch montage style, the aesthetic equivalent of a cheap jump scare, haphazardly splicing in newsreels, Olivier’s Henry V, and the music of Young Fathers, whose gritty beatcraft I generally appreciate on its own. Or could be that I resent films where characters plunge nonsensically into danger for reasons I’m supposed to consider noble. Along the way, you get Ralph Fiennes as a cuddlier Col. Kurtz, “alpha” zombies who pluck spinal cords out by the head (pretty cool), Jodie Comer adding another accent to her CV, and a newborn baby to symbolize how life overcomes death or whatever. “Pretentious” is generally a lazy insult for dummies, but what else do you call it when a film makes such a show of insisting it has achieved technical feats and reached emotional truths that remain far beyond its grasp? C+
